


Alive

by sunshinemellow



Category: Naruto
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Love, Romance, needed to get this out of my system?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:33:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26502193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshinemellow/pseuds/sunshinemellow
Summary: And then she grinned, white teeth gleaming in the dark, torn lips twitching back to reveal bloodied electricity. He almost expected to smell ozone when she exhaled quietly.“I know,” she whispered, eyes gleaming. “Don’t you feel alive?”Small drabble tinged with battle excitement + general desire and yearning.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Hatake Kakashi
Comments: 9
Kudos: 67





	Alive

**Author's Note:**

> Hellooo! I felt compelled at like 3 am to write something dramatic and imagistic? Basically I'm procrastinating on my update for Buried, but if you squint you can almost read this as a mini companion piece staged somewhere in general mission times ? This Sakura is a little sharper than the version in Buried, but not by much. Enjoy my self indulgence! Also the second bit switches tense-- that is intentional, I'll leave it up to you to decide why !

She was vicious, he realized.

She leaned next to him, her breathing rapid and sticky with exertion and maybe just a little blood. They listened to the sound of pounding feet on the other side of the wall behind them, and she looked at him—

Eyes _green_ , face smeared with blood that was and wasn’t hers, and when she smiled it was feral. He wondered for a moment—no, there was no sealed beast in her, was there?

A corner of her lips curled up, her face steeling itself, frozen halfway between fierceness and the battlefield’s rare and momentary repose.

“We might not make it out,” he murmured, shocked at himself for saying something so sacrilegious and damning, especially to her. She, who had always needed to have her spirits bolstered.

And then she grinned, white teeth gleaming in the dark, torn lips twitching back to reveal bloodied electricity. He almost expected to smell ozone when she exhaled quietly.

“I know,” she whispered, eyes gleaming. “Don’t you feel alive?”

When she launched herself back into the fray, ragged throat full of a bellowed battle cry, he wondered if perhaps she had become the most ruthless of them all.

As he watched her twist and gore bodies with her fists, he realized of all of them, Sakura would survive.

She had learned how to.

* * *

Her eyes are _green_ again, flecked with bits of gold and darkness in the low lighting. In the quiet rumble of drinking ninja around her, she looks at home.

He watches the small amber glass she knocks backwards, her head tilted, her long white jugular exposed for an instant, then gone with a decisive grin, her cheeks flushed, teeth white and feral all over again in his mind’s eye—

He realizes, breathless, that she is _magnetic_.

He is leaning closer and she turns and flashes another electric grin at him, a little less feral but no less charged and before he can stop himself he realizes that he’s mumbling, his gloved hand shielding his lips from the rest of their group—

“You’re so _alive._ ”

She stops and considers him, eyes dancing, body leaned against the counter, lithe and poised. He nearly finds himself wishing she would strike, if only to see the uncoiled brutality of such effortless poise. And then she laughs, full and maybe a little too loud, a little too much.

The tender smile she gives him ricochets in shudders down his spine and she murmurs, “I’ve learned how to live.”

* * *

She is different now, he hears them whisper. Her touch is as likely to break as it is to mend, her sharpness leaves invisible lacerations in her wake. The awe of a village that had seen her at half strength, at half power.

He knows that they resent her for it, that they miss the placid and even surface, but it has been replaced by a slow churning and reactive chaos. She thrums with it, power pulsing out of her, and he finds himself drawn like a moth to a flame. Missions, training, anything—

He craves the glow of recognition in those fierce eyes, desires nothing more than to be looked at and _seen_ by her.

And she sees him, her eyes appreciative, saving quiet grins for him when he feels her energy spike and ebb in its flow. He thinks if any of them had sensed even the barest glimpse of this power in her all those years ago, it would have been her that was called _prodigy_ even as now she is called _master._

He feels her chasing it on missions—the challenge of survival, the edge of a cliff she wants to stare down and laugh at. He is racing along behind her, fingers brushing at her back, at the power there and

He has never felt so at home than when he is in her powerful embrace, locked in lethal arms, feeling _grounded_ and somehow, for the first time in his life, _whole._

**Author's Note:**

> we love the gratuitous use of italics! thanks for reading !


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